A couple years ago, one of my ideas for an article was to collect tricks for citation counting together in one place and publish it. I worked on it for a while, but it just didn’t seem like something worthy of publication in a journal. In addition, when I would reread my outlines, I was bothered by how cynical it sounded. One of my colleagues recently suggested that I put together a workshop on the topic.
To get started on planning a workshop, I’m going to put the pieces together here.
To start, there was a news article this week that bugged me. There isn’t enough detail in the article to know for sure what happened, but I have my suspicions.
Jeffrey Litwin took the amount of money that universities received for research and divided it by the number of journal articles from those universities. That gave him average cost per paper. Then he ranked the universities.
Some of the “least productive” universities in dollars per publication were Texas A & M, Carnegie Mellon, North Carolina State, and MIT. These colleges are known for their engineering programs. Patents and secret research conducted for the military don’t get included in Litwin’s paper count, so it’s a penalty for universities with a lot of that kind of research under Litwin’s method.
Litwin’s data came from Thomson Reuters. The news articles don’t say exactly how he got them. Assuming Litwin used the Web of Science data, though, there may be a hidden penalty from in Web of Science’s choice of which journals to include or exclude. Web of Science is not perfectly even in its journal coverage for every discipline. I’m not sure it would be possible for it to be perfectly even.
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